Spent a ton of time on Hotline servers in the 90s. I wonder if any of them still exist. I'd dearly love to be able to pop back into my teen self and mess around on one.
> There were major concerns about maintaining a viable industrial base.
Maybe from the military industrial complex that was pulling in billions annually. Everyone else hoped that we would scale back after the insane global c*%k measuring contest that was the Cold War.
In retrospect, was the peace dividend a good idea? We got a europe that couldn't protect itself, the US playing bombs in the desert for 20 years and building anti-terrorism focused systems which will have no value against a near peer adversary, a navy that forgot how to build good boats, and a general refusal to learn the always relevant lesson of "build more ammo"
We did scale back. Military spending was cut back in real (inflation adjusted) terms at the end of the Cold War, and bottomed out as a percentage of GDP in 2000.
After 2001, military spending went way up of to fund the Global War on Terror. Most of that was a total waste and failure. Now the GWOT is essentially over and funding priorities have shifted to containing expansionist regimes in China and Russia (and to a lesser degree Iran) as part of Cold War 2. It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down to the minimum size necessary to defend the homeland, but you might not enjoy the results of letting hostile foreign powers dominate the rest of the globe.
The real spending went down a tiny amount despite the largest army of the world was no longer in existence and there was no credible threat what so ever.
I always love how people fall for the false military budgets, the war cost, the veteran health, the nuclear cost and a lot of other associated cost that is conveniently hid outside of the 'military budget' despite it very clearly should be in the same bucket.
> It is certainly an option to adopt an isolationist stance and cut the military-industrial complex down
Ah the old 'anybody that doesn't believe absurd amount of military spending is an isolationist trope'. Never stops getting old that one.
How much should we cut the military budget? Please give a specific number and show your work.
We all understand that there is a huge amount of waste. But in practice it seems to be difficult to cut that waste without losing essential capabilities.
It's redundancy, not waste, in the majority of cases. Look at what's happened to the Russian army to see what happens when there's no redundancy built-in to your logistics and supply chain, redundancy is essential to the capability of US military might.
Von Braun knew that if you didn't ask questions, your government might just give you Jewish forced labor for your rocket plant, which you'd gladly accept.
Von Braun also knew that if you built missiles for the power-hungry US military, they'd conveniently forget the fact that you were a Nazi.
There are also a proliferating number of sun-sync earth observation small sats. These are often from capital/mass/volume limited new space companies. Lowering their initial launch mass allows them to prove out a business model for a lower cost and then refuel it if it works with future capital. Benchmark's "pay as you go" SaaS-like model is also interesting in the same vein.
This is super feedback. Glad you like the newsletter. I feel like we often find it hard get a view into when startups hit what they consider important milestones—those seem to get lost in the noise of flying grain silos and such. Some attempt at aggregation of space startup press releases or similar might be place to start… I'll have to give this a bit more thought. -Ben (co-editor of OI)
This had the only details I could find anywhere on the Internet about the actual encoding of the images (4-sec video still -> audio signal). Plenty of stuff on decoding, but nothing except this that has primary sources that I could find.
Was doing research for the latest issue of Orbital Index (orbitalindex.com).
